Subscribe

Listen to the Podcast

Appalachian aesthetics and why I’ve been thinking about it

The following post ran on the blog of composer, pianist, and educator Nate May. It is reprinted here with permission.

This morning I made a list of a dozen books I need to read before I start having answers. I’m probably going to have to beat myself over the head with these books, and I trust I’ll be seeing stars before I start seeing constellations. Right now it’s just questions and hypotheses – little openings that I want to crawl into and look around inside.

My overarching project, the way it’s formed itself in my mind right now, is an aesthetics of contemporary Appalachia. Aesthetics in its messiest sense – the mythologies, politics, identities, values, fixations, aspirations, and perceptions that can be harvested and steam-sealed into an art-product (as in, anything that people look to for artistic value, however perfunctory) that for whatever reason smacks of Appalachian-ness. I want to identify it so I can participate in it, and help those who are helping to move it in the direction of conscious, dignified work that has a place in the American and international artistic conversation.

Here’s one hypothesis, one cave-mouth that’s begging to be spelunked: that the aesthetic that we allow to define us is frozen, coated in amber. That those of us who embrace a positive history of the Appalachian people feel we have only one resource to mine that is in demand by the rest of the nation. I’m speaking here of the mountain folkways – the banjoes and dulcimers, the quilts and clogs, the tall tales and moonshine. I want to be clear that this is an incredibly valuable resource, that we are in fact one of the few regions in the country that has a folk heritage as well-known and rich as this. It’s even doing a lot of good for the liberation of an oppressed people. But on the other hand, we seem more concerned with preserving it as it was than engaging with it as it is today. We cling to an image of our idyllic mountain past because it’s the only thing that shields us from the barrage of cultural assaults that face us.

Bluegrass may have been the last major innovation in the Appalachian arts, and people are even surprised that it’s as young as it is (younger than some of the folks who listen to it). Its strength and staying-power lies in a fact that leads me to my second hypothesis. Bluegrass, just like pretty much every important musical style in North America, has origins in African as well as European styles. The banjo itself is an African instrument (I just discovered this site, which documents its storied pan-Atlantic life). Yet black Americans are not a part of the picture that we draw upon as Appalachian heritage. In fact, the most easily accessible picture nationally is that we are purely white and predominately racist. I will never quite forgive Jon Stewart for a segment he did in the 2008 primaries, which showed multiple back-to-back interviews with racist West Virginians, followed by Stewart’s commentary, which involved him putting on a straw hat and drinking moonshine to the delight of the studio audience.

So here’s my second hypothesis: that we undervalue our diversity here. We white-out a significant portion of our history, much to our own detriment. It’s not just blacks who get this treatment, but anyone who diverges from that image of the pioneer white mountain family with its clear gender roles, simple ideas, and little political ambition. We miss out on the reinforcing effect that an embraced multifarious heritage can have on a culture – the same effect that biodiversity (which we can boast as among the best in the world here) has on an ecosystem and that economic diversity (the lack of which has plagued us for centuries) has on an economy.

So what’s the endgame for all of this? Why is this important? It’s important because Appalachia is an oppressed region, and whatever forces – economic, environmental, cultural, political – oppress us from the outside are reinforced by our own self-oppression, our own fatalism. It’s the same colonized mind that Steve Biko recognized among the oppressed people of the apartheid regime – a mind that says, “The current is strong so I may as well swim with it,” or, in the lyrics of Woody Guthrie:

This dusty ol’ dust is a-gettin’ my home

And I’ve got to be driftin’ along.

Aesthetics are vital for survival, for vitality itself. They are as important for the development of a region as roads and bridges, because they are why we travel on the roads and bridges. A people assured of its own strength and dignity can define, demand, and implement its own progress.

I’ll save more of the soapbox material for after I’ve immersed myself in more of its constituent ideas and realities. In the meantime, I’d love to hear from anyone who has ideas to share about this.

One Response

If you want to understand Appalachia look to nature. The aesthetic to many of us is the view that we see every day. It surrounds us and feeds us. The crafts of today were the necessities of yesterday, we were willing to do without much for the freedom to do as we please. It all comes from the world around us.

Last six months:

By year:

From the Archives

Jane Gentry — piano teacher, Appalachian folk-music historian, weaver — was an inspiration for the movie Songcatcher. She was born Jane Hicks in 1863, the first child of Ransom and Emily Hicks, in Watauga County, NC. “My pappy were a minister, name of Ransom Hicks. Mammy were always peckin’ me over the head with a […]